EDITORIAL: User fees' by government agencies are same as taxes

But York County’s new coroner, Pam Gay, recently put forth an idea that might show the way to get rid of one of those unpleasant certainties.

No, not death — unfortunately.

Ms. Gay wants to impose a $50 fee for her office to perform reviews before bodies can be released for cremation. We half-jokingly called it a “death tax” that people who choose cremation would have to pay before a loved one could complete the ashes-to-ashes cycle.

Ms. Gay took exception to that characterization, firing off a guest column explaining that these reviews, required by state law to make sure possible evidence of criminality isn’t destroyed, are time-consuming for her office -- which is busy and getting busier all the time. She explained that these aren’t taxes. No, they’re user fees (“user” presumably referring to the family rather than the deceased).

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Why, she argues, should all county taxpayers have to foot the bill for services they’re not directly using? Why not just charge a fee (not a tax!!!) for such services -- just like in the private sector?

Hmmm. On second thought, maybe she’s on to something there!

Taxes stink -- why do we even have them? We all have to pay into one big government pot for things that we might never use -- or even want.

Why don’t we have user fees for all public services -- coin-operated government?

Why should you have to pay for a road you never use? Most York countians probably never travel to, say, Erie, Pa. So why are our taxes used to pay for roads way up there in the northwest? Let those people pay for their own roads via user fees -- and we can pay for our roads in the same manner.

Now, putting up little tollbooths at the end of each block would be impractical, but in the age of E-ZPass and Google maps, maybe we could devise a system that tracks where we drive and sends us a bill each month. Money raised by each road would go into a separate account for its maintenance.

By the same token (and this is a complaint we hear a lot), why should people who have no children in school have to pay taxes for education? Let’s impose user fees -- public school tuition.

How about police? Why do we all have to constantly pay taxes for cops when most of us rarely call them to report crimes -- and most of us are never arrested? Couldn’t they all just carry little cellphone credit card swipers and charge us whenever they interact with us in any way? That way, if you never use police services, you don’t have to pay for them. Lawbreakers, of course, already pay user fees in the form of fines and other incomprehensible “costs” tacked onto traffic tickets.

Also, why do we have free public county parks? Put up a tollbooth at the entrance to each one. There’s no reason a person who never visits Rocky Ridge should have to pay for its upkeep. That’s just silly.

How about the state Legislature? Is there a way to pay for that with user fees? Most of us have nothing to do with lawmakers -- and want nothing to do with them. So why do we all have to pay their outlandish salaries and perks? Hmmm. This one is a little trickier to implement. A fee to lobby? No fee, no access? Oh, right. That’s the way it is now.

Funding the military via user fee is also a bit tricky.

If you didn’t pay a fee, the military wouldn’t protect you in the event of a Russian invasion? Nah, not practical.

How about a freedom fee?

Apply it to free speech, assembly and religion. If you didn’t pay the fee for a “First Amendment license,” you could be arrested for speaking out or gathering to protest (and then be subjected to inmate fees -- which are already gaining in popularity). And maybe we could put a little fee booth at the door of each church.

There is just no need for broad-based taxes to pay for government services. And if it turns out people aren’t willing to pay for certain government services, let’s eliminate them -- let the free market decide.

This is brilliant!

Now, if we could just find a way to eliminate death, we could do away with the cost of coroners and cremation review fees altogether!

P.S. For the satire-detection-impaired. We’re not serious about any of this. Certain core functions of government should be shared among all citizens, not just “users,” and we still think cremation reviews should fall into that category.